


Worth It

by pamdizzle



Series: Welcome to Midam Hell... [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angelic Grace (Supernatural), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff and Smut, M/M, Michael Playing with Himself, Mutual Masturbation, Post-Episode: s15e08 Our Father Who Aren't in Heaven, Souls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:01:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27048370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pamdizzle/pseuds/pamdizzle
Summary: Following the events at the bunker, Adam's attempts to comfort Michael send the pair into new territory and deeper understanding.
Relationships: Michael/Adam Milligan
Series: Welcome to Midam Hell... [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1977553
Comments: 29
Kudos: 147





	Worth It

“Are you okay?” Adam asks the second their feet touch solid ground again.

He isn’t sure where they are yet, but that’s half the adventure, he finds. Before he died, Adam hadn’t dared to dream of traveling the world. He and his mother could barely afford to subsidize his many scholarships let alone plan a vacation across state lines, never mind abroad. The past few days with Michael, riding shotgun as the angel stretched his wings for the first time in a millennium, has damn near checked every box on the bucket list he didn’t have the forethought to create in his first life.

Michael manifests at Adam’s side, his jaw a tense line. He sighs, a long draw of air he doesn’t need expelled in a rush between them. “I…no.”

Adam fights the urge to study this archangel the way he wants to—at length, unabashedly. How they used to, in the cage, when that’s all there was to do at times. When words failed, and time dragged on in slow, uncountable beats. Instead, Adam blinks and sets his eyes on the horizon. They’re in a field of wild lavender, Adam thinks. The realization quirks his lips into a smile, the purple shoots of tiny flowers remind him of his mother.

“You know, it’s okay to be angry,” Adam says. “You’re allowed to be angry at Him.”

For long moments, Michael says nothing. Then, “All this time, I followed His word. His every command. I believed His will to be just, I believed His judgement infallible. He created all of us, everyone, and all things. He assigned us purpose—assigned me purpose.

“And now, after all of eternity, I find that purpose is not to restore harmony between all His creations, but to entertain Him. That my father did not create me as an expression of his love, but of boredom. Even all of mankind, whom he commanded us to love and protect, merely created for the sole purpose of self-adulation. He struck my brother down for his ego, his weakness, but it was only contrived to tell someone else’s story?”

At this, Adam finally makes his appraisal. It is painful to look at him, to see such unfathomable loss brimming in eyes that are the exact shape and color of his own but with the depth of the entire universe in their gaze. Michael is so old, and what the hell is Adam supposed to say to him?

“I’m sorry,” he decides. “I wish…hell, I wish I could tell you what it means, but I’m only a thousand years old and not a day wiser than eighteen for it.”

Michael snorts, something lighter, less burdened washing over his familiar features. “You had wisdom to spare in the company of your brothers.”

“Not much wisdom hanging around that bunker to begin with,” he wryly suggests. Then adds, “Does it matter so much? I mean, aren’t all of us—all beings—self-interested? Even selfless acts evoke rewarding feelings, right?”

Michael frowns. “What’s your point?”

Adam shrugs. “I get it, sort of. I mean, you angels exist on an entirely different level. Still, we aren’t so different I can’t relate to being lied to or abandoned.”

“But?”

Adam quirks a brow. “However-”

“Synonymous.”

“Yet.”

Michael squints. “Reaching.”

Adam chuckles, comforted by Michael’s willingness to fall back on their familiar word games. Another habit they picked up in hell, one Adam also finds comfort in performing.

“Fine,” he concedes. “I get it, _but_ what does it matter why He created all this?” He gestures to the world at large. “All of us? You. We're here now—you’re here now. Granted, He didn’t make it easy, what with the pining and the cage, but say Sam and Dean actually do stop Him. You'll be free to explore your own purpose. Strike your own path forward.”

“Wise words from a purportedly unwise soul,” Michael replies drily. “Miraculous.”

“We both know I didn’t say anything you didn’t already know.”

To this, Michael’s apparition shrugs. “I used to _know_ a lot of things. I used to be sure. Now…I’m not sure of anything, and I know even less.”

Adam wants to offer some kind of encouragement, but his mouth opens around a yawn instead.

“Your soul grows weary,” Michael observes.

Adam grins, fond. “You mean I’m tired?”

“Sure.”

“It’s funny,” Adam muses, “I don’t remember ever feeling tired in the cage. Just…restless.”

“Your body was fully sustained in hell by my grace,” Michael explains.

Adam frowns. “That doesn’t exactly explain why I’m tired now. Isn’t your grace still 'sustaining' my puny human form?”

Michael's grin is wry when he replies, “Something like that.”

“So what gives?” he presses, finally giving into temptation and stroking a nearby lavender stalk.

Adam is keenly aware that the conversation they’re having is taking place in his mind. Logically, he knows that Michael's projection is simply that. Yet, he feels Michael's proximity outside his body like he would any other person. When the vision of Michael moves closer, Adam can feel the heat of his not-body along his back, blocking the breeze even. When Michael’s hand comes to rest on Adam’s shoulder, it has physical weight and a strong grip when it squeezes.

“Our arrangement is…unique,” Michael tells him. “After everything, I thought you might want to…experience the world the way humans do.”

Adam exhales on a chuckle. “With all my aches and pains?”

“Not quite,” he replies easily. “But your senses are online—taste, smell, touch—”

“Exhaustion?”

“You aren’t exhausted,” Michael corrects. “You… _we_ are overwhelmed.”

Adam can’t argue with that. “It has been one hell of a day, huh?”

Michael hums, his grip on Adam’s shoulder tugging him gently around. Adam doesn’t fight it, allows himself to be guided until he stands face to face with Michael’s visage. The archangel appraises him a moment, frowning slightly. “We should rest.”

Adam feels his eyebrows climb toward his hairline. “Michael?”

“Please.”

“Um. Okay—”

\--

Adam blinks, and they’re on the winding veranda of a picturesque cottage that, for all appearances, is in the middle of nowhere. Michael tilts his head toward the doorknob, insisting Adam lead the way inside. It’s a test of sorts, to see if he will argue the point. The point being that he and Michael agreed upon leaving hell that Adam would show him the world through the eyes of a human. Flying around the globe notwithstanding, Michael has done his best and Adam isn’t so uptight or speciest that he’s going to make an archangel subdue everything about themselves that makes them unique just so he can pretend hell never happened and he isn’t being possessed by an angel, albeit willingly.

Besides, Michael just found out his father basically lied to him for an eternity, that God is a fraud and life has no meaning, so Adam is willing to do whatever is necessary to ease his existential burden. If this is where the angel wants to ‘rest,’ Adam isn’t going to deny him any creature comforts.

Instead, he rolls his eyes, and leads them into the cottage. It’s clean inside, with exposed log walls and polished wood floors softened by plush area rugs. There’s a fireplace against the far wall to Adam’s immediate left, surrounded by cozy-looking leather chairs and an enormous suede sectional. Straight ahead is a hallway that leads to bedrooms and a bathroom, he assumes, and off to the right is a moderately sized kitchen with stainless steel appliances set into granite countertops. The island doubles as a breakfast bar, stools tucked neatly beneath it, but a large table and chairs are visible just behind it, pushed up against the wall just off the side of the backdoor.

“Is this a real cabin, or did you just snap it into existence just now?” Adam teases.

“It’s real,” Michael insists, but with a snap of his fingers reveals its true state in the real world. Old, abandoned, dilapidated. He snaps again, and it is once again remade. “I repaired it.”

“Nice work,” Adam muses. “Must have taken ages.”

Michael grins, eyes warm as he seats himself awkwardly down into one of the overlarge leather chairs. Adam watches as the angel appears to test its cushions, pushing himself deep into its back, hands gripping experimentally at the large armrests. 

“Is this…relaxing?” Michael asks, clearly not finding it so.

“I sure as hell hope not,” Adam replies with a titter.

He turns toward the hall and makes to explore what lays behind its closed doors. Beyond the first, he finds an office, behind the second, a bathroom. Finally, he discovers the master bedroom and its en suite bath behind door number three. The bed is enormous, covered in quilts and too many pillows and, oh, how well Michael knows what makes him weak. Adam wastes zero time plopping onto it, limbs akimbo, eyes closing on a sigh as his head sinks into the pillows. He enjoys several moments of absolute still and quiet, until it becomes clear Michael has remained in the other room, affording Adam the privacy no one asked for, or even cares about anymore.

“Come here, Michael,” he says softly, a quiet prayer Michael will hear despite whatever shield he might have erected. As expected, when Adam opens his eyes, the angel stares back at him where he’s leant against the window. “Over here,” he says, patting the empty side of the bed. “Come lay down beside me.”

Michael furrows his brow, mouth pressed into a contemplative line. “Why?”

“Why not?” Adam counters. “Just because we aren’t in hell anymore doesn’t mean we can’t…you know. Cuddle, or whatever.”

Michael snorts. “You think I need—”

“Yeah, I do,” Adam interjects, eyes carefully averted to the ceiling. Michael hasn’t tried to take that tone with him since the beginning, and Adam has zero desire to return to that space even for a second. “I think you’re hurting—I _know_ you’re hurting. And there isn’t a lot I can do about it—I know that, too—but I can do this. I can give you what you gave me, I owe you that much—”

“You owe me nothing, Adam,” Michael says, the force of his conviction strong enough that it shakes a couple pictures loose from the walls. “You never had a choice—what you offered me, you offered to survive, and I took it without a second thought. I shoved your soul aside to make room for my own self-righteous purpose. You were nothing to me and you…you saved me, in the end. Adam—”

“I don’t want to talk about that. Just come here,” Adam demands, finally, his voice tight with emotion. “Rest with me. Let me…be here for you.”

Michael doesn’t hesitate this time, crossing the room to first sit and remove his jacket, and then mimic Adam’s prone position so that they lay side by side. Adam lifts his arm in invitation. “Closer.”

“Adam—”

“I know,” Adam tells him, and he does. He knows what he’s asking for is intimate, that as close as they are while sharing his body, Michael has a series of carefully constructed psychic walls between them. Not even after 1200 years together does Adam fully understand how his body can contain not only his soul, but whatever stardust it is that comprises Michael’s grace, his angelic version of a soul. At least, that’s how Adam has come to think of it. But his body does contain them and, what’s more, there seems room to spare at times; simultaneously connected yet wholly separate. Michael keeps them at a distance he deigns appropriate for privacy, tries to give Adam space without isolating him altogether, which is what he’d done in the beginning.

Michael says their arrangement is unique, but Adam knows that ‘unique’ actually means ‘unnatural’ among his kind. Angels don’t share space like this with human souls. What they’re doing—it isn’t done. Michael describes what happened as pushing Adam aside, containing him within the smallest space possible until the cage eroded so much of his control that he was unable to maintain it, and now…he keeps them down on purpose. It isn’t done, and what Adam is asking for in this moment flies in the face of every angelic standard operating procedure pertaining to vessels, and the use thereof.

“Do you?” Michael questions.

Yet, even as he says it, he slowly turns toward and into Adam—toward his soul, for that is what they are in this place. Souls Adam’s mind is made to interpret as bodies because it would explode otherwise, apparently. He’s asked.

“I trust you,” he replies, as Michael settles into his side. Adam brings his arm down to wrap around his shoulders. “One at a time.”

Silently, Michael nods in acquiescence, and Adam marvels at how it feels, dragging against his sternum. That’s a fucking archangel on his chest. Then, slowly, incrementally, Adam _feels_ him as, one at a time, Michael unravels the psychic barriers between them. It’s like warm pressure against his core, unfurling around his heart and lungs, moving steadily outward to the rest of his limbs. It makes his pulse quicken, his breath short and useless under the intensity of Michael, unabridged, wrapping around Adam. Around his soul.

_Adam._

“I’m okay,” he reassures. “Closer.”

_Reach for me._

Adam isn’t sure what that means, not really, but he imagines himself grasping through heavy fog, blindly searching for the person he knows is right beside him. Suddenly, it’s there, something soft and downy against his desperate fingertips. He grips it tight and pulls.

“Oh, fuck!”

In an instant, they are together, and Adam can’t see anything, but he feels it. Feels Michael moving around him and through him, the swirl of foreign emotions and impressions mixing with his own. The anger hits him first, sharp and new, but swiftly overcome by despair. If angels wept, Michael would be sobbing. As it is, Adam cries for him, tears leaking down his face, chest aching as if this pain is his own.

Michael can sense his distress; Adam knows because it echoes inside of them. A new feeling rises up to soothe their despair, and he nearly chokes on the weight of Michael’s unbound affection. It isn’t like Adam didn’t know, right. He knows Michael has grown fond of him over the years, but this is…he didn’t know what it meant.

“Holy shit, you love me,” Adam blurts. “You love me a _lot_.”

He can feel Michael’s chagrined resignation echoing through their connection. 

_Yes. More than is…appropriate._

Adam frowns, uncomprehending. “What do you mean?”

 _I have wanted this,_ Michael confesses. _I want…_ more _than this._ _I would bind you to me if I could._

“And that’s…bad?” he guesses.

 _Some would say,_ Michael responds, and Adam can feel the weight of the angel’s self-recrimination bearing down on them both. _Some might even say such sentiments are deserving of a fall._

Adam avoids the topic of whatever the hell Michael means by ‘bind’ and asks, “Can you feel me, too?”

_Yes._

“But…you’re not?”

_No. You did this for my benefit, you needn’t compromise your own feelings to share mine._

“Do it,” Adam tells him.

_Adam, you needn’t—_

“I want you to,” he argues. “We aren’t trapped in a cage anymore. You could have gone back to heaven; I could have told you to leave. You didn’t. I won’t. I’m choosing this. Not because I have to, but because I want to.” Adam swallows, skittish in a way he hasn’t been in years. “I want you to know me, Michael.”

For a moment, everything is still, but then he feels the subtle shift of Michael’s grace, brushing against his soul. His soul! A door opens, or a wall crumbles, and Michael’s grace is swept away by Adam’s own soul, his broken pieces and gentle tides. He can feel Michael’s every revelation, every moment of awe and quiet disbelief. And to himself, he thinks, _fuck it_. Adam focuses on his own feelings for this ridiculous, incredible being; his gratitude, his respect, the love he’s grown and cultivated and kept tucked carefully inside.

It’s over too soon, but before Michael withdrawals, he gets the impression that this is overwhelming for them both, but especially for an archangel unaccustomed to the raw nerve that is human emotion. When Adam opens his eyes again, they are back on the bed, Michael now braced above him, staring at Adam as though he’s never truly seen him before.

Adam wants to kiss him. So, he does. He doesn’t expect the eager desperation with which Michael kisses him back, the needy sound he makes—a sound Adam is sure he couldn’t replicate if he tried—as he fumbles to cradle Adam’s face within his hands. Michael has erected new walls, but they aren’t so impenetrable that Adam can’t feel the echo of his touch against Michael’s flank, the heat it sends skittering along the archangel’s true form, shifting and writhing on some adjacent plane.

Michael draws back just enough to whisper against Adam’s lips, “Touch us.”

Adam shudders, made suddenly and painfully aware of all things physical. He hasn’t experienced an erection in his physical body in over a literal millennium. “What the fuck?” And, once more with feeling: “What the fuck?!”

Michael’s hands are all over Adam’s soul, petting and pleading. “Please, Adam. Please.”

“No, don’t—you don’t have to beg, fuck!” Adam reaches for the button on his trousers as Michael watches, seemingly transfixed on Adam’s hands. “This is not how I thought this day would end.”

“How did you envision it, then?” Michael teases, though it sounds more than a little shy.

Distractedly, Adam replies as he fumbles with his zip, “With a nap, maybe? Sudoku? Hell, I don’t know! Definitely didn’t have ‘bang an archangel’ on my to-do list.”

Finally, his cock is free and they both seem to come slamming back into the moment at the same time. “Holy shit,” Adam says. Hand shaking slightly, he reaches for the base. “Like, riding a bike, right?”

He glances at Michael to see his head tilted in consideration. Squinting, he admits, “I have never done either of these things.”

Helpless in the face of the angel’s bald confusion, laughter bursts forth from Adam’s lips and just like that, the tension is manageable. “You’re sure about this, wings?”

Michael grins, leans down to kiss the smirk off Adam’s face. “Show me.”

The first grip at the base of his erection has them both groaning with an overwhelming spike of pleasure and relief so intense it’s almost painful. When he drags his fist from the root to the tip, Adam knows they aren’t going to last. “You okay?”

Michael, eyes closed and brow furrowed with whatever effort it’s taking to maintain his apparition, licks his lips. “This is…very intense. Is it supposed to feel this way?”

“Hard to know,” Adam admits. “I don’t remember exactly how it used to feel, but I mean…it’s good, right? It feels really, really good.”

“May I?” Michael asks, gesturing to Adam’s groin.

With a salacious wink, he replies, “Go for it, kid.”

Michael gets a glint in his eye at that, and then his apparition is no more, but his presence is lodged there just beneath the surface, their hand reaching for their cock and Adam has about .25 seconds to think, ‘Holy shit, I’m about to get a hand job from an angel’ before Michael does, in fact, go for it. His grip is clumsy at first, experimental, before he uses Adam’s pleasure feedback loop to read his body like a roadmap.

No sooner does Adam think, ‘ouch, a bit dry,’ than their dick is suddenly wet, slipping through Michael’s grip with ease and mounting tension. Adam joins in by tugging on their sack with his left hand, massaging their testicles the way he remembers feels incredible. It isn’t difficult for the angel to discern what makes their body tick, taking his cues from Adam, and once he gets the hang of it, he adds his own techniques by twisting his wrist or speeding up to bring them closer only to slow them back down when he feels their muscles begin to tense in preparation for some precipice. 

Adam groans, helpless. “Fuck, you’re a natural.” Bitterly, he amends, “Of course, you are.”

“Why do humans bother with anything else when they can be doing this?” Michael ponders aloud, marveling at this whole new world of sex and depravity they’ve unearthed between them. “It is…a miracle…they accomplish…anything at all.”

“Pretty sure…most people…don’t have sex…with their soul,” he manages to reply between clenched teeth.

“Your soul is very alluring,” Michael tells him. Then, softer, adds, “I want to feel it inside of me.”

Adam sputters at that thought. Fuck, is that even possible? “Shit. We’re…we’re gonna come.”

Michael gasps, his grip tightening just a fraction. “We’re going to have an orgasm?”

Adam wants to laugh. He wants to cry. “Yes, Michael! Fuck, yes, we are!”

“Oh!” It would sound deadpan on anyone other than Michael, but the second their climax hits, Adam knows they’re both overwhelmed by it. For endless moments, their mingled being is all sensation, wave after wave of tingling, paralyzing ecstasy. His eyes roll up, his mind is white noise.

When Adam finally emerges from his endorphin-fueled haze, it is to find himself, or Michael rather, testing the consistency of their ejaculate between their shared fingers. “Uh...”

“In the early years of humanity, my brothers and I would scoff at humans and their seeming obsession with sex,” Michael explains. “We thought you messy, disgusting creatures, weak to your frail bodies and its various flawed systems. Always hungry, always thirsty, always leaking one form of excrement or another. I was…appalled by it, but I tolerated it for His sake. It was my duty.”

“And now,” Adam questions, “still appalled?”

“I was a fool,” is Michael’s instant response as he materializes at Adam’s side, and the depth of his self-flagellation is crushing.

“Hey, give yourself a break,” Adam tells him. “You didn’t know. It’s not like He explained anything to any of you.”

Michael’s gaze, when he turns it onto Adam’s own, is a soft, careful thing. He spares a moment to clean away the mess they made of Adam’s stomach and hands, then: “Kindness, love, devotion—these are things which should not require an explanation. I thought I knew them. I thought I learned them from Him, from His example, but now I see that what I thought was love was a lie.

“I only know the difference now, because of you. Because you showed me love when you had nothing else and no reason to believe I would thank you for it. You spared me your resentment and offered me forgiveness instead. Forgiveness I didn’t ask for, forgiveness I didn’t deserve. And now you offer me comfort, and I don’t deserve that, either.”

“No one deserves forgiveness, or comfort, or kindness, Michael,” Adam says. “I didn’t forgive you because I had to, it wasn’t a choice I had to make for you. I forgave you because I wanted to, because I came to know you. And then I came to love you. And I would rather love you than resent you or hate you. Or, make you suffer for whatever sins you think you’ve committed. I didn’t ask you to comfort me either, remember? But when you felt me suffering, you chose to acknowledge it. You chose to be there for me. That says more about who you are than anything else.”

Finally, Adam sees the lingering fog of God’s betrayal eek from Michael’s gaze as he settles himself once again within Adam’s embrace. “Even so, I am grateful for you.”

“Yeah? Well, I got no regrets.” Helplessly, he cards his fingers through Michael’s hair. “Let’s get some rest.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is basically what happens when you all you want to do is write some porn featuring an angelic masturbatory possession and instead, you get 3,000 words of character study, fluff, h/c and about 600 words of said porn. FFS. Anyway, this is my first SPN fic, though I've been in fandom for years, just as an observer. Seeing Michael and Adam's interactions really inspired me and gave me such feels to the point where I'm finally writing a fic for the fandom I've been haunting for 15 years... I'm sure that means they'll both be dead by the end of the show, but hey...a girl can give her fictional characters a chance at happiness in the meantime, yes? 
> 
> I know our contingent is small, but I also know it is passionate. <3 If you liked the story, I really do appreciate comments and kudos, but especially comments.


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